Team of astronomers conclude that Earth usually has more than one moon

Earth usually has more than one moon, according to a team of astronomers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the University of Helsinki,and the Paris Observatory.

The 2,000-mile-diameter Moon, so beloved by poets, artists and romantics, has been orbiting Earth for over 4 billion years. Its much smaller cousins, dubbed “minimoons,” are thought to be only a few feet across and to usually orbit our planet for less than a year before resuming their previous lives as asteroids orbiting the Sun.

Mikael Granvik (formerly of UH Mānoa and now at the University of Helsinki), Jeremie Vaubaillon (Paris Observatory) and Robert Jedicke (UH Mānoa) calculated the probability that at any given time Earth has more than one moon. They used a supercomputer to simulate the passage of 10 million asteroids past Earth. They then tracked the trajectories of the 18,000 objects that were captured by Earth’s gravity.

They concluded that at any given time there should be at least one asteroid with a diameter of at least one meter orbiting Earth. Of course, there may also be many smaller objects orbiting Earth, too.

According to the simulation, most asteroids that are captured by Earth’s gravity would not orbit Earth in neat circles. Instead, they would follow complicated, twisting paths. This is because a minimoon would not be tightly held by Earth’s gravity, so it would be tugged into a crazy path by the combined gravity of Earth, the Moon and the Sun. A minimoon would remain captured by Earth until one of those tugs breaks the pull of Earth’s gravity, and the Sun once again takes control of the object’s trajectory. While the typical minimoon would orbit Earth for about nine months, some of them could orbit our planet for decades.

“This was one of the largest and longest computations I’ve ever done,” said Vaubaillon. “If you were to try to do this on your home computer, it would take about six years.”

In 2006, the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey discovered a minimoon about the size of a car. Known by the unimaginative designation 2006 RH120, it orbited Earth for less than a year after its discovery, then resumed orbiting the Sun.

“Minimoons are scientifically extremely interesting,” said Jedicke. “A minimoon could someday be brought back to Earth, giving us a low-cost way to examine a sample of material that has not changed much since the beginning of our solar system over 4.6 billion years ago.”

The team used the Jade supercomputer at the National Computer Center for Higher Education (Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur, or CINES) at Montpelier, France.

This work was supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Founded in 1967, the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa conducts research into galaxies, cosmology, stars, planets, and the Sun. Its faculty and staff are also involved in astronomy education, deep space missions, and in the development and management of the observatories on Haleakala and Mauna Kea.